Posted 06/27/2026
I've felt it, you've heard it, everyone wonders about it. "I'm getting older now and I just can't seem to finish any games. I used to be able to play video games aaallllll the time when I was a kid." Can you relate to this?
I've felt this in one way or another! Even with a job I have now that gives me plenty of free time, I've still picked up and dropped a number of video games! The Steam backlog hasn't gotten any smaller! What gives?!
Lately, I've been wondering if this means I need to throw in the towel on video games. After all, I've been filling my time with plenty of other things - time for friends, reading, writing, walking, church things, the works. Maybe The Normies are right - video games are just for kids and people with nothing better to do. Maybe it's just the reality of growing up.
...until I plowed through the game Perfect Tides. Shortly after I played that, its sequel, Perfect Tides: Station to Station came out and I finished that game as quickly as possible. Some time later, Deltarune chapter 5 came out and I finished that as soon as possible. I got Burnout 3 recently and I've already put a few hours into that and plan to continue doing so.
With all these streaks of being totally gripped by certain games, I had to ask myself: why can I not finish all these other games I got, while the games I've listed above keep getting all my attention?!
The answer? Getting older doesn't mean I don't have time for video games - it means I don't have time for BAD video games.
Oh, so it must be because the internet pushing short form content has fried all our attention spans, right? I'm not sure that's the whole story. (It might be part of it.)
If we're comparing my kid self and my current self's connection to ways to spend time, let's take a kite for example. If I was a kid with a free summer day and all I had to play with was a broken kite, I can guarantee you that I'd spend 3 hours running around with that broken kite trying to get it to fly around against all odds. My current self would either ignore the broken kite and go on a walk or maybe go out and buy a new kite. Or find something else to do entirely.
Don't you think it will be the same with video games? I've noticed that a lot of the video games I've been putting down are just not fun to play (with some exceptions). I think I would say the majority of video games I play are for fun, for entertainment. Sometimes I'll play an artsy or experimental kind of game, but really only when that kind of mood strikes me, definitely not frequently. So for the bulk of games I play, if it doesn't FEEL right or good to control, I'm kind of looking at it like a broken kite. As an adult, I can easily find something else to do on my own without being stuck to one thing. Why fuss around with this game that's boring or frustrating to play when I could do aaanything else?
RPGs can feel like a sore spot for me on this topic - I've played a gooooooood chunk of RPGs in my time. Final Fantasies, Xenoblades, Personas, Mario and Luigi games, the whole shebang. I've put over 100 hours into some of these games and series. But now? Trying to dip back into some of these sorts of games leaves me quickly bored. Is it because the idea of sinking 100 hours into something useless when maybe I should be doing something else more important weighs on my mind? Goodness no. I run a website for heaven's sake. It's because I might put a couple hours into one of these sorts of games today, it's 90% poorly written/animated/voiced cutscenes and 10% repetitive, unoriginal, mediocre gameplay and from that I think... "do I really want to play this off-putting video game for the next 100 hours of my free time?" No! I'm gonna find something else to do!
The above reason is why I put like 200 or more hours into Persona 5 Royal alone while parts of Persona 3 and 4 I had to push myself through - Persona 5 isn't just a good JRPG or a funny little anime game, but it's just a fun game period. It's fun to run around in that game. Hitting the right combos of attacks feels awesome. The soundtrack is amazing.
It's the same simple reason there are still hundreds of people re-playing Super Mario 64 today when so many other 3D platformers old and new go unnoticed: why take a chance on a game that might be bad when you could play a game you KNOW is good?
All this probably explains why I've gotten into so many arcade-y type games recently - shoot em ups, racing games, action games - any game that has just the right game feel - these are the games that hold my attention lately.
And of course, all of the above is why I haven't bought a AAA game in some time - those are all about big budget set pieces and squeezing every last drop out of the same two boring game systems... if I pick up a game and it's open world and there are skill trees and you pick up a collectable item and it's like "congrats that's 1 out of 1000 macguffins find em all!!" I'm dropping that game so hard. Well, I'm just not buying that game to begin with really. Why buy a $70 game that's gonna pull crap like that, be 100 boring hours long and be generic as heck when I can buy something like an indie game made by a human that knows what Real Gamers want and give money to an actual human instead of into the pockets of some dumb CEO (I have no regrets for run on sentences you'll never catch me alive copperrrrss)
Or, to put all of this another way... if it's not fun, why bother?
I don't know what homer simpton in dragon's ball costume is doingthere .
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